Madness in the name of competition

Days before, one of the premier exams in the country concluded. Just after the exam, many students came crying out of the halls as they felt the papers were lengthy and tough. Whatever the content and structure of the question papers, the question here is about how we are putting our young generation to extreme stress. Our competitive exams like NEET, are indicative enough of the crazy attitude we have adopted as a society towards our education. We conclusively judge the success and failure of our students by their performance in these, so to say, prestigious exams. All those who cannot crack these exams are then considered as an inferior lot. Nothing can be as horribly wrong as this attitude. It consolidates a definition of success that is totally erroneous but is counter productive. We create an atmosphere where a handful of ‘success stories’ give birth to a large scale failure. Not just career, it ruins the life of hundreds, if not thousands of students, who could otherwise perform well in their lives.

It is not about the multiplicity of career choices in an increasingly diversified market of jobs. It goes way beyond that. When we raise our children on a set belief that their social estimation, their economic safety, their life prospects – all this hinges on their performance in a particular examination, we seal their fate. In a world where the landscape of jobs is so fleeting that one doesn’t know whether the field of medicine remains the way it has been there for decades, if not centuries, why this crazy rush for making our children doctors, and doctors alone; in some college here or in Antarctica!

What has added to this madness is the belief that if the child doesn’t get into a professional college at this stage, it means he is not worth anything. Nothing can be as suicidal as this. This is one of the main reasons our colleges are now suffering in terms of student enrolment, and their interest in colleges education is diminishing. This situation calls for an overhaul of the education system, including the competitive exams. The government should think creatively about this and save the future of children, future of education and restore some sanity in this regard.